yeah trying to think of a movie that was known for its soundtrack or a particular (new) song, and all I can think of is maybe Garden State with that Shins song

as far as something more pop, eh maybe Fast and the Furious w a Ludacris song or something?

I dunno, maybe the 00s are an unusual case, because as open-minded as you want to be, pop culture from the Hilton/reality tv era may have been so lame/embarassing/insubstantial/moronic/derivative that what mattered really wasn't at the center, and looking there could be missing the point... (I like Ludacris, but the bloated crossover dreck the film industry produced for the pop audience in the 00s seems to be the kind of bloated trash you can only enjoy in the way that you might enjoy a big budget Nic Cage flick. hard to say still, but I think that the 80s were maybe just objectively better at making loveable pop movies)

I think this question is difficult because there are a shitload of movies from the 00s that are actually consciously reaching for iconic status, if not in a Saturday Night Fever way then certainly in a Breakfast Club/Ferris Bueller's day off way. Donnie Darko being probably the most obvious example. There are also films like Superbad that have an iconic character but aren't necessarily iconic in their own right.

This is excluding the massive blockbuster action adventure films because it clearly isn't one of those.

Napoleon Dynamite is a pretty good call actually. If there's any one cinematic or socio-cultural narrative I'd use to sum up the 00s it's 'geeks inherit the earth'.

Juno is a good nom for 'modern zeitgeisty soundtrack. I went to see my friend's high school students perform music and short plays at a downtown street fair on Friday. That anemic little Moldy Peaches song from Juno came on between plays and EVERY SINGLE KID sang along with it really loudly. I thought, oh shit, it's a generation anthem (surprising to me since the song sounds like it's embarrassed to exist, but these kids were BELTING IT).

Yeah, I feel like we should probably be deferring to teenagers on this one. I doubt somewhat that the olds in the '80s were suggesting The Breakfast Club as an iconic movie of that decade ("Well, clearly, the correct answer is Hannah and Her Sisters.")

Yeah. They have more of a tribal identity thing going, so they are more likely to even have an answer to this question. For contrast, would any of us be able to pick an 'iconic movie' for the decade of the 1930s? And if we did name one, would anyone who was alive then agree with us?

My own sense of the 00s is completely disengaged from the few movies I saw in theaters. To me they were just a means of spending 100 to 130 minutes being entertained. I never expected to be given a dose of the zeitgeist for the price of my ticket.

isn't it more comforting to find that there is no longer a single movie to speak to a generational audience, though? i'd feel really bad if any of sat night fever, breakfast club, or reality bites encapsulated anything about me or my peers.

This is a really puzzling question. All of the biggest grossing films tend to be pulp exercises. In that Roger Corman documentary by the end of it they say that Hollywood has focused on previously cult-level exploitation pop films.

My personal answer for this is STEALTH because the ridic intelligent plane is suddenly "downloading all the music on the entire net!" Or maybe Fast & The Furious first for similar reasons, remember the VW dude was famed for being able to "find out anything about anyone on the internet."

Based on this, I would say that the most "LOL 00s" movie is Live Free or Die Hard, where the bad guys are able to manipulate to entire American infrastructure, including every traffic light and some random lights in a traffic tunnel, via hacking them through the internet. Also, it's a sequel that turns a late 80s/90s action hero who was defined as an everyman character into a cool, badass übermensch, which seems apt for 00s blockbusters.

Anyway, Reality Bites might've been the 90s movie for Americans, but for Europeans it was surely Trainspotting, right? I can't remember any other movie whose themes, style, soundtrack, etc were so iconic of its era.